The Neudorf Case of 1952.
This case occurred in the house of the mayor of Neudorf in Baden. We entered the case at the request of the Department of Public Health. I reported on this case in Tomorrow, under the title, “A Poltergeist Visits the Mayor.” The mayor’s 13-year-old son Bernhard was the agent, for when he was absent, nothing happened, and when he was finally sent on holiday, the disturbances permanently stopped.
The occurrences had begun in the courtyard and in the stable and finally penetrated the interior of the house. The mayor, who as an office holder objectively viewed himself in the same manner as he would have if it had happened to another, noted every single instance. There were also many eyewitnesses, especially those not belonging to the family. I will cite some incidences which correspond to the patterns as noted by Tizane: “Objects seem to form themselves in the air.”
On the day before we began our investigation, four witnesses had observed that it had rained nails sixteen times in 45 minutes. They came, as was later shown, from a locked kitchen cupboard in the basement. The doors were locked. Bernhard and his mother lay in bed. The mayor, his elder son, Alois, and the latter’s wife, Frieda, were watching.
“Bernhard pulled the covers over his head so as not to be hit,” Alois told us in passing, without realising that he was thereby furnishing us with an important bit of evidence refuting the suspicion that the boy may have thrown them. The nails fell straight down like little silver fish, but they were not seen until they were about twenty centimetres under the ceiling, the witnesses stated.
“Displaced objects sometimes do not show a regular trajectory.” The mayor saw a clothes pin climb straight up to the top of the door and then continue to fly at a right angle.
“Foreign objects penetrate into a closed space. When picked up by observers, the objects give a sensation of being warm.” The day before we arrived, seven objects were reported to have appeared in the kitchen within 16 minutes and were observed by five witnesses, some of them not members of the household. I was able to reconstruct the event down to the tiniest detail from the testimony of witnesses given completely independently of one another. It looked as though the objects rushed out of the wall, they said. Also, they all agreed that when picked up, the objects gave a sensation of being warm.
Psychodiagnostic test of the boy showed a personality structure which, in later investigations, always appeared: high inner tensions in connection with puberty, frustration and aggressive behaviour with a tendency toward an explosive vent.
Thus, I was once more confronted with the phenomena of tele-apportation and the penetration of matter by matter. The level of evidence in this case was high because of the freshness of the testimonies. There was no suspicion of a common agreement or common knowledge among the witnesses as often happens when information is exchanged.
From “New Developments in Poltergeist Research” by Hans Bender, in the Proceedings of the Parapsychological Association, no. 6, 1969.